›Space: From Foray to Habitation

The conference called Space: From Foray to Habitation will be held on July 9-10, 2012 (Monday and Tuesday) at the Sefton Hotel on the Isle of Man. The 1.5 day conference features three sessions, each addressing a broad set of issues relevant to the future of taking space into everyone's lives.

Education for a space-faring society:
Is the framework of traditional university instruction adequate to prepare citizens of a space-faring society?
How soon should students grapple with the frontiers of knowledge by participating in research?
What should scientific and engineering curricula comprise, and at what level of rigor?
What should be the role and emphasis of the humanities? What values and ethical norms will be most compatible with space-faring life?

Institutional barriers to space habitation:
Can truly pan-human collaboration for the inception and growth of a space-faring society overcome national institutional barriers?
What modes of government can assist progress?
What legal frameworks are appropriate to address ownership, off-world mining, reclamation and salvage, etc.
What sort of economic arrangements could exist among the various colonies of a space-faring society?

Technical barriers to a space-faring civilization:
How does the habitation paradigm change the nature of launch systems, re-entry/return systems, etc.?
How do we deal with human factors in prolonged spaceflight, and design wholly or partially closed systems? How are trajectory design and propulsion systems affected?
A space-faring society may consist of widely dispersed, small human groups making use of local resources. There is an obvious need for habitation technology- a portable, integrated set of technological elements enabling each human group to generate its own consumables, mine/extract local resources and repair or fabricate its own tools. Do the components of such a technology already exist and can they be integrated?

The conference is organized by the Scientific Preparatory Academy for Cosmic Explorers (SPACE), a nascent non-profit academy founded in 2012 dedicated to multidisciplinary and international higher education in space. This conference also serves as the kickstart ceremony of the SPACE.